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When it comes to deploying electric-vehicle charging stations, University of California Davis is giving it the old college try. The school, located just outside of Sacramento, has 38 plug-in vehicle charging stations on campus, making it the most charging-friendly institution of higher learning in the country. That's according to ChargePoint, which says more than 1,100 on-campus stations have been deployed since the first one was installed at Pasadena City College four short years ago.

"If you've never heard of the Renault Twizy, that's because it's silent." That's the tagline for a new video of a promotional stunt by the French automaker that sent the funky looking EV driving into a university library to show off how quiet it is. Get it? You aren't supposed to talk in a bibliothèque but you can drive an EV there.

In the 47-year-history of the Chevrolet Camaro, there have been countless college-age kids spending a ton of time getting under the hood and souping 'em up. Now, General Motors is adding a twist to the concept by donating 16 Camaros for the EcoCar challenge that puts university teams together to wring out better fuel-efficiency out of various vehicles. No word on whether there will be donuts on anyone's lawn, as suggested by 80's punks the Dead Milkmen, but the idea's never a bad one.

Chrysler is re-establishing a partnership with Kettering University in Flint, Michigan, for students in the automotive engineering program. This relationship was put on hold in 2008 when the automaker began its financial crisis.

Hoping to land a job at Ferrari after graduation? The company's been known to recruit straight out of college, but your best bet may be to enroll at the Enzo Ferrari Faculty of Engineering at the University of Modena e Reggio Emilia.

It's not all li-ion battery tech that the federal government is givng support to these days; biofuels are getting some tax dollars as well. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) recently announced that six biofuel projects at universities around the U.S. will be getting up to $4.4 million in funding. The good news is that the money is for work in non-food cellulosic ethanol research. Full details are available after the jump, but here are some snippets:

You might expect the announcement of the funding of a plug-in hybrid research center to be boring. Not if North Carolina governor Mike Easley has anything to do with it! The NASCAR governor says, "the Middle East has the U.S. by the tail" and we should "get off the gas and get on the juice." Plug-in cars might sound like "the Jetsons," says Mike but "we are ready to develop the Wolfpack Power Pack."

In light of the "backwards-travelling wave" that researchers recently discovered as a cause of congestion, another study has pinpointed a possible major contributor. The University of Utah's Traffic Lab uncovered that drivers paying more attention to yapping on their phone – hands free or not – add to the suffering of us all. Talking while driving leads to drivers who take considerably longer to change lanes when following slow-moving vehicles, drive slower overall, and take longer t

Finally, there's an explanation for those wasted hours we spent on the MassPike today asking no one in particular "what the (dirty word) is this (dirty word)?" A team of mathemeticians from the Universities of Exeter, Bristol and Budapest developed a mathematical model revealing that traffic jams are caused by idiots. Okay, not exactly. The real explanation is that unexpected events, such as being cut off, require slowing below a threshold speed for smooth traffic flow. As we've all observed, wh

In July, we told you two plug-in Priuses were coming to the United States for road tests. ln a ceremony Friday at Toyota headquarters in Torrance, Toyota will hand over those two plug-in Priuses to University of California at Irvine's Advanced Power and Energy Program and Institute of Transportation Studies at Berkeley. Representatives from the universities and the California Air Resources Board will speak at the ceremony. If you go, feel free to send us some pictures.

One of the curses I've faced as a recording engineer is that the symphony of every day life drills itself through my skull. It can be quite distracting. People try to converse with you, and all you can focus on is the groovy rhythm coming from a rattly interior bit. Avant-garde musicians and composers have been attuned to the music life creates for many years. John Cage, for instance, wrote pieces that use big fans as an orchestral section. Cage's 4'33 would be the perfect cellphone ringtone, bu

Researchers at Arizona State University, working on prolonging the life of hydrogen fuel-cells by increasing hydrogen storage density, have hit upon a new chemical combination to achieve their goal. By taking sodium borohydride which is used to store the hydrogen, and adding to it a chemical found in antifreeze, the researchers have found that the fuel-cell can generate more electricity without chemical by-products inhibiting the reaction. Fuel-cells are expected to be utilised in virtually ever